I'm after sort of a trifecta of terminal performance from my deer cartridge. I tend to hunt in the rain, an the ranges I shoot them at tend to range fron very close to very very close <grin>. This year's buck was at maybe 10 yards. The doe, maybe 20 yards. I blew a chance the night before on a doe that was about 8 feet away at one point.
Anyway, the trifecta is: I want it to put the animal down fast. I want a red carpet of blood, if it doesn't. And I want this with minimal bloodshot. I try not to shoot "meat" but sometimes that's the angle you get...
The .358 has been VERY impressive in delivering this trifecta on deer for me. I would say it whacks them out of proportion to it's "mere" .308 parent case size.
Elk are a different hunt. More open country, much bigger critter, etc. There, I'm thinking in terms of putting the animal down ASAP, but I'm not real worried about bloodshot since ranges are longer and there's so much more meat. All I can really say there is I've been impressed by how "mid-premium" bullets (Accubonds mostly) from large cartridges have performed.
What consistantly boggles my mind- in the context of how much guys like us overthink this stuff, is how much some guys completely ignore it! I'll pick on my own brother. He was a poor college student, I was flush (oh, to be flush again... sigh... grin...) so I bought him a 30-06 and put a Leupold on it. I dinked around handloading for it, but in the end, found that it just loved 165-gn factory Corelokt. Fine. I'll make him use something else for elk but there's his deer load. I tell him this over... and over.. give him an empty box of the stuff for reference. So next season, he shows up with... ta da! A couple fresh boxes of 150-gn Winchester ammo. Not through testing or research mind you; just because that's what they sold him...
I'm sure the Win 150's would zap any deer walking but point is, he was extremely casual about the whole thing, and I guess that's typical for a large proportion of hunters.
